The OCD Game

I often joke that I have a mild Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m not sure how much that’s true, but the fact is that I often take pleasure in extremely repetitive, braindead tasks. The Nameless Mod owes a lot of polish to this fact; for example it’s unlikely that the advanced difficulty options would’ve been so thoroughly implemented without my semi-OCD, and the ogg files in the soundtrack were only ID-tagged because I had so much fun doing it.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy open-world games so much.

If you have experience with open-world games, you’ll know almost all of them base a lot of their gameplay on repetitive, “grindy” tasks. Assassin’s Creed was widely criticised for its repetitive, samish missions (four simple mission types, constantly repeated). STALKER had randomly generated missions likewise falling into four categories and literally endlessly repeated. Grand Theft Auto 4 has (as far as I know) randomly generated police missions as well, that you can trigger by getting into any police car anywhere in the world, and using its built-in computer interface to locate nearby crimes to thwart.

What’s more though, all of these games have some kind of explicit scavenger hunt element to them. Often it’s structured by an overarching optional goal such as an achievement for collecting every hidden item, other times the objects you hunt are their own reward to obtain. STALKER’s randomly appearing artifacts boost your statistics when you equip them, for example, but there is no reward for finding certain amounts of them. GTA4 on the X-Box 360 gives you an achievement for killing all 200 pigeons in its New York City and another achievement for collecting every hidden item.

Why does this appear to be such a prevalent design element in open world games, and are there any realistic alternatives? Is it even a bad thing?

FUEL, which was released last Friday and which I pre-ordered because I was impressed by its 14,400 km² open world and the promise of good rewards for exploration, is probably one of the most explicitly OCD games I’ve ever played. Its critical path is based on achieving “stars” by winning certain “career” races which unlock new regions for you when you gain enough of them. A career race can be completed on three different difficulty settings – Normal, Expert, and Legendary – and each will give you a star such that you can skip some career races if you’re good enough to win other career races on higher difficulty settings.

That’s all good – in itself, it’s no more compulsive than any other game because you don’t have to complete all the career races to progress, the amount of career races in each region so far seems pretty limited (the most I’ve encountered in a region as of yet is 6 races), and they’re all quite distinctive. The true compulsiveness takes the form of optional objectives distributed across each zone.

In addition to a limited amount of career races, each zone has a larger amount of “challenges” which are races with no difficulty options and a greater variety of goals (for example, Helicopter Chase charges you with beating a helicopter to a goal so far away you can’t see it for most of the race, meaning you’ll be trying to follow the chopper until you’re close enough to the end that you can go directly for the finish line). Beating challenges gives you a large amount of “fuel”, the game’s currency. Each region also has an amount of “vista points” (which offer particularly fetching views – at least according to the developers, I would say the quality of these vistas so far has been debatable) and “liveries” (which are collectable paint schemes for the various vehicles you can own).

For each region, the main world map displays how many challenges, vista points, and liveries you’ve located and completed/collected. When you first enter a region, it’ll be mostly unexplored, meaning you can only see points of interest near the region’s race camp. Points of interest will appear on your map when you drive near them in free form mode. Alternatively you can make them all appear by catching – ie. crashing into – a particular roaming doppler truck which is added to your map when you complete a certain career race. There are three doppler trucks in each region: one for challenges, one for vistas, and one for liveries. Finally, each region has a certain amount of “mavericks”: special vehicles that can’t be purchased for fuel but only obtained by catching them – these mavericks are also added to your map by completing career races.

As if those are not enough collectibles, the game also has barrels of fuel distributed generously throughout each zone. When you ram a barrel, you gain 100 fuel – not a lot, but it adds up – and if you’re lucky enough to find an arrangement of three stacked barrels, you’ll get 400 fuel. I don’t know whether fuel barrels are randomly placed – your map screen doesn’t show how many of them you’ve found, but there are achievements for collecting your first oil drum, your 100th oil drum, and your 500th oil drum. There are similar achievements for owning 10 vehicles, 40 vehicles, all 74 vehicles, finding 10 vista points, 50 vista points, all 95 vista points, winning 30 challenges, 100 challenges, all 190 challenges, collecting 50 liveries, 100 liveries, all 148 liveries, obtaining 24 pieces of driver gear, 48 pieces of driver gear, or all 72 pieces of driver gear.

There’s also an achievement for completing everything. It’s called Completion obsession syndrome. Clearly they know.

FUEL is far from the only game to rely on simple scavenger hunts to encourage the player to make full use of the game world. Assassin’s Creed has those hidden flags everywhere. Far Cry 2 has the hidden diamond suitcases. Prince of Persia has light seeds. Fable 2 has gargoyle heads and silver keys. Grand Theft Auto 4 has the pigeons.

It’s a super effective way of exploiting your open world. No matter how much actual content you cram in there, parts of your world will always have unused areas that the player has no reason to explore. If you don’t reward the player for poking around in places where the critical path doesn’t explicitly take him or her, you can’t expect a lot of players to deviate from that path, and you might as well make a linear game. A scavenger hunt is the most economical way to reward such exploration: all you need is one art asset for the player to hunt, and a mechanism to let the player know how many of them have been collected. A further reward for collecting everything to make the whole task seem slightly less like the huge waste of time that it really is certainly helps too, be it external to the game (eg. achievements) or internal (eg. Fable 2′s special artifacts).

I believe I just stated that you can’t produce enough content to fill out an open world, but of course that’s not entirely true. World of Warcraft has very little wasted space, partly because their gameplay genre lets them just fill any empty areas with constantly respawning mobs, and partly because they’ve produced a frankly ludicrous amount of content for their game, not a square meter of it wasted thanks to their enormous player base which guarantees that everything is experienced by somebody. I also hear that Saints Row 2 is a possible exception to the rule, in that no matter where you go and what you do in its world, it will always throw something new and interesting (and often daft) at you. I have yet to play this game to confirm whether it really does have unique content everywhere, but if it does, that’s highly impressive.

Despite my self-confessed semi-OCD, I don’t very often achieve full completion in these games. I’ll often spend far more time hunting the objects in question than I really enjoy – I’ll keep looking for them hours after I’ve stopped having fun, but I never persevere long enough to find everything, simply because my sense of “games should be fun and this is no longer fun” kicks in and overrides my collector’s compulsion. Fable 2 is the only game where I’ve come really close to collecting everything, having destroyed all 50 gargoyles and found all but 2 silver keys, but that was largely because Fable 2 offered actual in-game rewards for collecting everything, and because after all, there were only 50 of each and the world wasn’t that big.

I’m not sure how I feel about scavenger hunts as a means to encourage exploration. I don’t outright disapprove, but I can’t say I’m very impressed by it either. I would prefer simply using a variety of rewards such as small experience point bonuses, rare ammunition types, expendable inventory items, or even incidental story information, like for example Deus Ex or BioShock did. The important part is that you don’t know how many objects are left to find, which rewards you for experiencing as much of the game world as possible without driving you to spend more time exploring than you’ll actually enjoy.

The Looking Glass school of game design once again provides the best solution.